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Audrey Gelman, the Girl Most Likely

Ms. Gelman, behind Scott Stringer at an event following the result of the primary last month for New York City comptroller, which Mr. Stringer won.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

If you had to pick a low point for Scott Stringer in his recent David-versus-Goliath race against Eliot Spitzer for New York City comptroller, it would have been in early August. Mr. Spitzer, the scandal-plagued ex-governor, had a 15-point lead in the polls, coming off appearances on Jay Leno and Bill Maher.

“If it came down to name recognition,” Mr. Stringer recalled, “I was a goner.”

To help turn the tide, his campaign brought in some big names of their own. Instead of the usual list of endorsers, the Stringer campaign held a star-studded party at the Maritime Hotel in Chelsea. In a scene that looked more like a Fashion Week after-party than a political fund-raiser, a fashionable cross-section of cool New Yorkers (designers like Prabal Gurung and Pamela Love, night-life gatekeepers like Carlos Quirarte, and actors like Mickey Sumner and Lena Dunham) mingled on the hotel’s terrace, sipping Peroni beers under Chinese lanterns.

The party received coverage outside the local news pages. New York Magazine called it “the most hip fund-raiser in the history of the office of the New York City comptroller.” The New Republic cheekily hailed the party as “Moderate Chic.” Women’s Wear Daily, Page Six, Refinery 29 and even Vogue followed suit, with Vogue saying, “Not since Bloomberg banned smoking almost everywhere in town have city hall politics garnered so much interest among the downtown fashion set.”

Credit for that went to a 26-year-old political ingénue who wore a sleeveless white Dior cocktail dress that night that served as a magnet for the assembled photographers: Audrey Gelman. She had joined the campaign as Mr. Stringer’s spokeswoman, just weeks before.

In one of the fiercest fights this election season, Ms. Gelman emerged not just as Mr. Stringer’s avenging angel, but as a rising social figure in her own right, turning on the charm for local political reporters, roping in A-list supporters and teeing off against a well-armed opposition in bloody Twitter skirmishes. Lately, she is becoming equally familiar to readers of fashion glossies and to viewers of NY1.

“She really melds the downtown edgy piece of New York with the more staid political piece,” said Howard Wolfson, a Democratic strategist who was Ms. Gelman’s boss when she worked as a junior aide during Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential run. He gave her props for landing Mr. Stringer, a civil servant who favors blue sack suits, in the pages of Women’s Wear Daily. “I think that would be a first,” Mr. Wolfson said dryly. “And probably a last.”

Working in an arena — city politics — where it passes for “style” if you manage to keep the mustard off the lapel of your Poly-blend suit, Ms. Gelman cuts a striking figure. Fashion blogs like the Coveteur laud her quirky style and “unexpected mix of metal band T-shirts and ladylike slingbacks.” She popped up in Paper magazine’s 2013 list of “Beautiful People,” wearing a Mod-inspired Vuitton shift and Ali MacGraw pout. She can be spotted on the red carpet, including at Vanity Fair’s Oscar party, on the arm of her boyfriend, Terry Richardson, the enfant terrible fashion photographer. And she has had frequent cameos on HBO’s “Girls.” (As Ms. Dunham’s best friend, she is the real-life model for Marnie, the show’s tightly-wound careerist played by Allison Williams).

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Audrey Gelman watching early poll numbers come in on the night of the primaries last month.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Ms. Gelman established her downtown credentials early, befriending Ms. Dunham when she was 11. They “met cute,” in a manner that suggests a “Girls” spinoff for tweens.

“My mom was Lena’s shrink for eight years,” said Ms. Gelman over a recent lunch at the Mercer Kitchen, sounding nervous about disclosing such personal detail, even if it involves television’s Queen of Overshare. Dressed in business chic — a black turtleneck and camel slacks by the Row — she maintains a coquettish charm with reporters, but also showed a press secretary’s knack for revealing as little as possible, except where useful. In interviews, she drops the phrase “off the record” into conversation as casually as most people say “um” (she only relented to tell the story after receiving text-message permission from Ms. Dunham).

Audrey used to drop by her mom’s office in SoHo to do homework after school, and bumped into Ms. Dunham in the waiting room. They realized they had friends in common, and became fascinated with each other. “At the time, Audrey was pretty punk,” Ms. Dunham said. “I had it on good authority that she had pierced her nose with a safety pin at camp, and she had three fat blue streaks in her hair. I wanted in at any cost.”

But Audrey’s mother forbade her daughter from fraternizing with patients. Undeterred, the budding friends “started passing each other notes through emissaries,” Ms. Gelman recalled. The notes would say things like “This is a pic of me at the Western Wall” or “My favorite album is the ‘Felicity’ soundtrack.”

Eventually her mother found out and put a stop to it. The friendship was on ice until Audrey enrolled at Oberlin College in 2005, where Ms. Dunham, by coincidence, was a sophomore.

In the ensuing years, Ms. Gelman developed into a serious political wonk. She grew up in an activist neighborhood (West 107th Street on the Upper West Side) and in a politically aware family (her parents were staunch Democrats). Her own political awakening came in 2000, when, at the age of 13, she watched the Supreme Court decide the presidential election in favor of George W. Bush. “Like every Upper West Side liberal, I was outraged,” she said. “It just showed me that votes count.”

By 2008, she was so anxious to prove her mettle that she left Oberlin after her sophomore year to work on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. “She was my hero,” Ms. Gelman said of Ms. Clinton. “I would have given up all my worldly possessions just to work on that campaign.”

After Ms. Clinton’s primary defeat, Ms. Gelman returned to New York. By day, she finished her bachelor’s degree in political science at New York University. By night, she appeared on Ms. Dunham’s satirical Web series, “Delusional Downtown Divas,” which featured notables like the designer Isaac Mizrahi and the artist Nate Lowman. “I played the really nerdy friend who was into politics,” she said. “It was very much art imitating life.”

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At a presidential-debate-watching party in 2012 hosted by Downtown for Democracy.Credit
Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Following graduation, she took a job as deputy press secretary in Mr. Stringer’s Manhattan borough president office. It was not the most glamorous assignment, particularly for a budding fashionista who appeared in a short promotional film for DKNY Intimates and was often the plus-one for Mr. Richardson at art openings and movie premieres. Ms. Gelman generally refuses to discuss her personal life. And Mr. Richardson, who is 48, declined to be interviewed. But Ms. Gelman did allow that she was set up three years ago by a friend with the photographer, known for his pornography-chic portraits of skin-baring celebrities. “He’s a lot like me — neurotic, kind and into speed metal” she said.

But she liked the idea of rolling up the sleeves of her Jil Sander blouse and delving into politics as practiced at the street level. “People always pay more attention to what’s happening nationally,” she said, “but I think cities are now becoming an epicenter of activity and innovative ideas in government.”

During the 2012 presidential election, Ms. Gelman became more of boldface name herself, helping to revive Downtown for Democracy, a political action committee formed by the cool kids of the Manhattan art world in 2004. The group held fund-raisers that attracted the likes of Jack Dorsey, a Twitter co-founder; Dustin Yellin, the artist; B. J. Novak, the actor; and Gibby Haynes, the rock musician.

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Chloe Malle, a friend and Vogue’s social editor, said that Ms. Gelman brought those two worlds together effortlessly. “She might be this informed politico who can seem nerdy, but she has ‘Let’s go Mets’ tattooed on her inner lip,” Ms. Malle said.

By this past April, however, Mr. Stringer’s bid for comptroller was looking secure, so Ms. Gelman decided to move on to a job as a public affairs consultant with SKDKnickerbocker, a strategic communications consulting firm with deep roots in Washington, New York and Albany.

Then, Mr. Spitzer stormed into the race. Mr. Stringer needed all the help he could get, so he hired her back on contract from SKD to coordinate his media strategy as his campaign spokeswoman. Almost immediately, the fight turned nasty, and Ms. Gelman found herself trading haymakers on social-media with Mr. Spitzer’s Washington-import strategists, including Lis Smith, who directed the Obama 2012 rapid response program.

The war grew so heated that it generated articles of its own. After Ms. Smith attacked Mr. Stringer for “not being man enough,” Ms. Gelman fired back on Twitter, “Nobody needs a lesson in manhood from Eliot Spitzer.” (“The #fauxoutrage is a nice touch, but a little disingenuous,” responded Ms. Smith).

Mr. Stringer came to think of her as something of a bodyguard. “She was completely immersed in every aspect of the campaign,” he said, “driving the daily message and dealing with the incoming from these folks, dealing with the constant negativity, which frankly surprised me, coming from Democrats.”

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With her boyfriend, the photographer Terry Richardson.Credit
Dean Neville/BFAnyc.com

Like any good millennial, Ms. Gelman relied heavily on social media, filling her personal Instagram feed, which has 10,000 followers, with humanizing photos of Mr. Stringer and his wife, Elyse, intended to underscore his image as a solid family man, and implicitly, the un-Spitzer.

She was dogged in her lobbying for her candidate, recalled Annie Karni, who covered the race for The New York Daily News. Story pitches came in at all hours of the night, and the spin was relentless. “I remember riding in a cab with another reporter to an event one morning close to the primary, when we both got a text from Audrey asking us to tweet the results of a poll showing Stringer passing Spitzer,” Ms. Karni said. “She was not shy about asking me to get the main New York Daily News account, which has hundreds of thousands of followers, to tweet the news.”

On the night of the primary on Sept. 10, pundits regarded the Democratic race for comptroller as winner-take-all, since no Republican had held that office since the 1940s (John L. Burnett, a Wall Street veteran, is running on that ticket in the Nov. 5 general election).

Mr. Stringer’s primary night headquarters — Slate, a restaurant and lounge in Chelsea — was humming with nervous anticipation. As union representatives in T-shirts crowded in among young campaign volunteers dressed for a night on the town, and the play-by-play commentary from NY1 boomed from speakers overhead, Ms. Gelman slumped against a far wall, behind a bank of television cameras, nervously thumbing her iPhone.

Clearly exhausted after weeks of round-the-clock campaigning, she kicked off her Jimmy Choo spike heels and, for a moment, looked like a shell-shock victim ready for the first medevac chopper.

Then the exit-poll results started trickling in. Mr. Stringer had the lead, and it was building. Each positive sign seemed to send a jolt of electricity through Ms. Gelman, as she darted around the crowded bar in stocking feet, giving updates from Mr. Stringer to other campaign operatives.

By 11:30, NY1 announced that Mr. Spitzer had called Mr. Stringer to concede. But with Mr. Stringer still en route to take the stage for his victory speech, the spin duties fell to Ms. Gelman.

As Checkey Beckford, a reporter for NBC4 New York, approached her for comment, Ms. Gelman slipped the heels back on, strode into the glare of the cameras and flashed her cover-girl smile. Any sign of fatigue had vanished, as she churned out the sound bites: “New Yorkers believe we need a comptroller who is honest, has integrity, who has a record of delivering.”